


The Devil Within

by hacklesacademy (ladyvivien)



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: A tiny bit of canon-compliant cannibalism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Dysphoria, Canon compliant misogny, Dark Comedy, Don't fuck with Auntie Z, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Gender Swap (kind of), Horror, Infertility, Mild Gore, Past Relationship(s), Possession, Psychological Horror, Witchcraft, Zelda is a roller derby fan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 05:56:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16487117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyvivien/pseuds/hacklesacademy
Summary: Faustus Blackwood clears the chess board of one final piece, but Zelda Spellman has a trick or two up her sleeve.AKA the ‘Feast of Feasts’ AU where Zelda stages a rather grisly coup, but not in the way you might expect.





	The Devil Within

**Author's Note:**

> I'll keep quiet  
> You won't even know I'm here.  
> You won't suspect a thing,  
> You won't see me in the mirror.  
> But I crept into your heart,  
> You can't make me disappear.
> 
>  
> 
> **\- The Devil Within, Digital Daggers ******

**I**

There are advantages to being the earthly vessel for the Dark Lord. Not just the power - although that is a considerable boon - or even the obscenely comfortable accommodation. It’s the knowledge that his status as High Priest means that anything he does is automatically Satan’s will. Otherwise, why would He have appointed Faustus? So when he reinstates the Feast of Feasts, it is with the sure and certain knowledge that this is the right thing.

The fact that the first Queen chosen happens to be Patricia Hemlock  - never his staunchest ally - goes unremarked. She was, after all, an acolyte of the late Edward Spellman and the general consensus is that the Father of Lies is rewarding her for centuries of service. The next year, it is the wife of one of Faustus’ oldest friends with whom he’d slept on more than one occasion, and he genuinely does mourn her loss once he’s wiped the blood from his mouth.

So the cycle continues, and if more often than not the chosen witch is one who has been a thorn in his side - well, he just makes sure to sacrifice someone he actually likes the next time.

When Sabrina Spellman rejects her unholy calling, it’s clear that something must be done. It’s a shame, really - with his heirs on the way, he could use a good midwife and Zelda has always been a delightful lover. But with her gone the niece is entirely within his control, unless Hilda happens to find a spare backbone somewhere in that mortuary.

Besides, it makes Zelda so happy. She’s practically glowing in the three days running up to the ceremony - and if he makes an unusually frequent number of visits to her home then he can always claim it’s to reassure Sabrina. Hilda would gladly slam the door in his face did her status as reluctant handmaiden not forbid it but Zelda is pleased to see him, showing off the dress she intends to wear for the sacrifice with a shy smile like a girl on her first date. She would have made a lovely bride, he thinks as he unfastens it carefully.

 If only things had been different.

 

**II**

 

She’s still alive when he gets to her, twitching and shuddering on the floor like he’s seen her do so many times before. He puts his mouth to the fountain of blood spurting from her carotid artery and drinks. When he pulls back, her eyes are clouding over and he feels a flicker of pleasure that his face is the last thing she’ll ever see.

 “Thank you for your sacrifice, Sister Zelda.”

It costs him little to praise her now, but from her pained, beatific smile he can see that it means the world to her. He stays kneeling by her side for a few moments, listening to her ragged breaths until they stop coming and then he presses his mouth against her ear.

“You always did taste delicious”, he whispers, before sinking his teeth into her throat.

Afterwards, his pulse is racing and he finds himself hard as he so often does after these ceremonies. He could call any number of willing participants, all eager to fill the space Zelda has left, but for some reason he’s reluctant. Perhaps it’s sentimental of him, but he finds himself revisiting old memories - Zelda, prostrate before the altar in the woods clad only in the light of a waning moon. The way the wet grass had felt against his skin as he had spread her legs only to find her as sodden as the ground beneath them. He had fucked her right there and then, with no preliminaries, and their cries had startled a murder of ravens from their trees, sending them soaring into the air and blocking out the moon.

He collapses back onto his bed, spent and panting, when he hears her.

_You never did let me come first, did you Faustus?_

He jolts up, wondering whether madness or guilt got to him first, finds himself looking around the room against his better judgement.

_You know how it works. The witches who sacrifice themselves live on in each member of the Coven._

She singsongs the words as though she’s talking to a child. He could tear the room apart looking for Zelda’s ghost, but he knows he won’t find it. Her voice is coming from somewhere much closer than that.

"It’s meant to be a fucking metaphor!”

It has to be. There’s nothing in his books that ever mentioned this, nothing to suggest it was anything other than a pretty story to tell over a heaped plate.

_It wasn’t a metaphor when I asked if you’d miss me when I was dead._

“This has never happened before.”

He can practically feel her rolling her eyes.  

_You need to keep a list of who you tell that to, Faustus. After the first half dozen times, we tend to stop believing you._

He stumbles to the bathroom, shoving his fingers down his throat like a teenage girl after a bacchanal.

He needs to get her out of his system.

 _Such fuss_ she tuts as he retches into the bowl. _What was it you once told me, Faustus? ‘Just swallow and get on with it?’_ He can feel her laughing, a tickle in the back of his mind. _And don’t even think about brewing an enema draught. Neither of us want to sit through that one._

That does it, and he heaves into the bowl leaving it spattered with barely digested flesh. That has to do the trick, he tells himself. It has to.

_Poor Faustus. Must have been something you ate._

 

**III**

 

He wakes to find the covers kicked off and the window open, finds himself turning to face a second bed that isn’t there and feeling unbearably lonely. Any hope that last night was a bad dream vanishes as his head clears. If anything, she’s embedded herself in his consciousness like a splinter. A splinter who has very clear ideas about what shirt he should wear he finds, and chooses an old one with fraying cuffs out of spite. It will bother him all day, but Zelda was - is - twice as fastidious and if she’s trying to drive him mad...well, what’s sauce for the gander will do just as well for the goose.

He’s craving coffee, but not the black swill they serve the pupils. _No_ , that irritating voice in his mind informs him, he wants a Guatemalan single origin espresso and maybe some dry wholemeal toast, slightly burnt.

He’s fastening his cuffs when there’s a knock on the door. Constance enters before he can answer, maneuvering her bulk carefully into the room. He wonders if she can tell, if she can smell Zelda on him, if she’ll accuse him of yet another affair.

Before he can speak, jealousy slams into his entire body and he stumbles. Makes his excuses and promises he’ll be down in a moment before collapsing back onto the bed, fighting back sobs and a horrible feeling of emptiness, of worthlessness. Of failing in his one sacred duty to the Dark Lord.

 _Now do you see?_  Zelda screams in his head. _Now do you see what you did to me?_

He’d thought she hadn’t known.

Once his position was assured, he couldn’t take any more risks. Edward’s memory was held dear to enough people that even if his half-breed daughter posed no threat, a full warlock nephew might. So, on a clear moonless night, he jammed pins into two poppets with pretty blonde hair and ensured that Sabrina would be the last leaf to bud on the Spellman family tree. And thank Satan he did, or the mongrel whelp could well have diluted her line even further with that mortal boy and that doesn’t bear thinking about. Now he can mould Sabrina to his liking, turn her into a lever for his own plans even if she’ll be no use as a broodmare.

He’d never thought of what it might have cost Zelda, to see other witches bear children. Even mortal women manage it, but she - one of the most powerful members of the Church of Night, one of Satan’s most loyal servants - remained childless.

 _Pull yourself together_. Zelda’s voice is harsh, colder than he’s ever heard it. _I had to. Day after day, raising my brother’s daughter as though she were my own. You’re feeling just a fragment of my pain, Faustus Blackwood, and let that be a lesson to you._

She leaves him alone after that and by the end of classes he can finally breathe out again, sitting in his study and feeling in control for the first time in...he doesn’t want to think how long it’s been, but suspects that the answer involves the Academy’s newest - and irritatingly, most promising - student.

_Are you going to do that paperwork, or is it merely ornamental?_

"That depends,” he says through gritted teeth. “Are you going to bother me until my dying day, or are you planning on getting bored and possessing someone else?”

_You really haven’t worked it out? This little connection of ours is...special._

“I should have known you’d cling on by any means necessary,” he spits back. “You never did learn how to let go.”

_You had me slit my own throat in front of my niece and you expected me to be grateful. Well, as Sabrina would say - screw that._

This is a side of her he's never seen before. Aimed at others, of course, but him? She’d seemed so serene and sanguine when he’d visited her before the Feast. They’d drunk tea and he’d had a delicious slice of elderberry pie as he slid her hand up her thigh, sliding a finger inside her wet heat as Hilda had bustled around the kitchen.

“There was something in the pie, wasn’t there? You’ve been planning this!”

_For the past sixteen years. I assumed you’d get around to me eventually - once you’d run out of other women._

 The barb stings. Either he’s developing an unwanted conscience or she’s gotten under his skin in more ways than one.

“Am I really so irresistible you wanted to be with me forever? I’m not sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. I am known for my appetites, after all. Or did you just want to play voyeur? If I’d realised that turned you on, I’d have invited you to my orgies years ago.”

_Don’t flatter yourself. It wasn’t your body I wanted - it was your position. All those years I spent craving the ear of the High Priest, and now I have it._

“I don’t have to listen to you.”

_Don’t you? How’s the espresso?_

 He looks down at his cup. He doesn’t remember raising it to his lips, but the bitter taste of the beans lingers in his mouth.

 

**IV**

 

Zelda, it turns out, has already picked out her casket. Not that there’s much left to fill it, but it will look marvellous in the family crypt. The only flaw in the plan is Vinegar Tom, who had a memorial statue carved in his honour but remains stubbornly alive given that his mistress is still….present.

Which means, of course, that he’s now in charge of the slobbering mutt who is now sporting a cut across his nose thanks to Asmodeus’ unbridled outrage. Vinegar Tom just showed up on the Academy doorstop three days after the Feast and refuses to leave. Hilda has sent a dog-sized casket for what she assumes is his inevitable demise, but mostly the dog seems to sleep in it.

If that were his biggest worry about committing Zelda Spellman’s body to the earth, he’d be overjoyed. But Zelda is a backseat broomstick rider if ever he saw one, and so now he has an order of cursed black doves arriving any minute and the choir have been practising their laments morning, noon and night.

_It’s not every witch that gets to officiate her own funeral._

“You know, technically I’m the one giving your eulogy.”

_I’m sorry, but I don’t want my grieving loved ones to hear that in losing Zelda Spellman, the path of night has lost not only a loyal handmaiden of Satan but a magnificent backside._

“You do have a magnificent backside,” he agrees with a smile, the first one that he hasn’t forced in what feels like weeks. Then - “Did. You did have...”

She sighs, and it’s like dead leaves rustling in the November breeze.

_This, he gets nostalgic about. Well, it’s too late now._

“I didn’t have a choice!” he protests. “It was the will of the Dark Lord.”

  _P_ _lease. You’ve been using the Feast of Feasts to get rid of troublesome women ever since you were appointed._

“I’d thought I was at least subtle about it,” he grumbles.

_We’re Satanists, Faustus. We don’t do subtle._

Somehow the damn thing gets written, and if it praises her unholy devotion a little too effusively - well, he can always write it off to sentiment. It’s not like Constance can refuse him sex any more than she already is, and he’s not sure he could cope with Zelda’s running commentary. In any case, his solitary activities are even more enjoyable now that they’re no longer strictly solitary.

“We always did make a good team,” he whispers, reading it over.

He’d been on the brink of proposing, certain he could hitch his wagon to the Spellman star and get everything he ever wanted and a wife into the bargain. And then Edward met Diana and he saw his chance, mounting a campaign against the incumbent High Priest that should have worked, would have worked, except… People liked the changes Edward was making. The rules loosened, the standards dropped. All it took was the promise of his firstborn child and even the Dark Lord himself was ready to make an exception.

Edward, always bloody Edward. The golden boy, the anointed one, the man who had everything and was ready to throw it away for some mortal tart. And yet he got welcomed back into the fold, set to make his family into a dynasty when Diana’s belly began to swell.

He’d known then that Edward had to die, just as he knows now without a shred of doubt that Zelda might live in his mind but she can’t read his thoughts, or she’d have killed him where he stands, even if it meant killing herself. She always was vindictive.

It was one of the things he’d loved most about her.

 

**V**

 

He hates to admit it, but Zelda is efficient. Absolute power aside, there are parts of his job he’d rather opt out of and he’s happy to take a back seat while she handles the administrative side of things.

_Let me do the work while you just sit there and relax. I know how much you like to watch._

He finds himself sitting at his desk, sifting through paperwork until well into the morning, making notes in handwriting that isn’t his. She tuts over his accounts and he somehow submits a report to the Board of Governors that agrees to reallocate 20% of his discretionary expenses to a scholarship fund, but overall they work well together.

 She’s even uncharacteristically quiet at her funeral, although he sticks to the script just to be on the safe side. Afterwards, he takes her sister aside and although Zelda isn’t prompting him, he knows what she wants to say.

 “She loved you, you know. So very, very much.”

Hilda stares back at him coldly, radiating fury. “I never doubted it. Not for one violence-filled moment.”

She leaves him standing there by the altar alone, and in the quiet room he can hear a muffled sob.

He finds himself letting Zelda take charge more and more often - never taking, it, he’s very clear on that point. But sometimes he’s staring out of the window watching Sabrina walk the grounds only to find his cheeks wet with tears. The girl avoids him - them - now, after Zelda used his hands to squeeze her shoulder one too many times, which leaves them both annoyed and her silent and sulking whenever her and Sabrina are forced to interact. He scolds her for it, although he’s not sure she’s really listening. Sharing his body with the consciousness of his former lover is one thing – letting her take the reins is another matter altogether.

Still, it’s working well until Lilith shows up.

One minute they’re alone, the next Satan’s mistress is leaning against the door in a figure-hugging green dress - are mortals really allowed to teach like that? Perhaps he ought to pay a visit to Baxter High in the name of improving witch-human relations - staring at him as though there’s something she can’t put her finger on

“Miss Wardell? What in Satan’s name are you doing here?”

The voice is his but not his – his mouth, his vocal chords but prissier and higher pitched and, Hell forfend, distinctly American.

She’s getting stronger.

Lilith smirks. “Well, well, well. It seems you can’t keep a good girl down. Hitched a lift with the High Priest and now you’re riding him as far as he’ll go. Honestly, it can only be an improvement - he’s such a dullard.”

“I am still in here!” His voice echoes ridiculously in the room.

“Of course you are,” she says indulgently. Now you just sit back and let the grownups talk. I think it’s time for a fashion show, don’t you Ms Spellman? Other people’s bodies - who wore it best? No offence, Ms. Spellman, but I think I got the better deal.” A shrug. “Then again, I suppose you at least knew what you were…getting into.”

 This is unsupportable.  “I will not have my body taken over for…for… _girl talk_.”

 It’s the wrong thing to say, and the she-demon’s eyebrow arches. “I’m sure we can do something about that. Run along, dear.”

 Lilith snaps her fingers and suddenly he’s in his armchair with a glass of whisky. It’s more merciful than he’d expected until he realises the glass is half empty and his body feels strangely sore and tired.

_I must say, it’s rather invigorating being on the other end of things. So to speak. You know, I never did give you enough credit. It really is rather hard to last that long._

He doesn’t know what’s worse - that he’s technically had sex with the Dark Lord’s personal concubine, that he’s slept with an attractive woman and doesn’t remember it or that Zelda Spellman had sex with a woman and he wasn’t there to witness it.

_If only I’d known - Madam Satan taking such an interest in our little Sabrina! I always knew our girl was destined for good things. We really ought to get her on staff._

“It’s still my school.” His school. His body. If he says it often enough, he almost believes it.

 _I wish she’d spoken to me first, though._ Zelda isn’t listening anymore, if she ever was. He’s starting to wonder if it’s his control slipping or if he can finally see the truth - he never had it to begin with. _Sabrina was doing so well in history! Why couldn’t Lilith have taken over the body of her calculus teacher?_

 

**VI**

 

After Lilith leaves, the blackouts get worse. One moment he’s giving the morning assembly and then before he’s even finished saying “Hail, Satan”, he blinks out and somehow it’s eight hours later and he’s watching some inexplicable game involving angry women on rollerskates on one of those infernal mortal devices she’s managed to purloin. He fades back in like static to find his mouth hexing something called a jammer who, if Zelda has her way, will be trapped in those skates until the day she dies unless she learns to cheat without getting caught.

 He could handle the lapses in - well, existence, he supposes - if it weren’t for the fact that she’s so bloody talkative. Had she been like that in life? She’d always seemed to know her place, to have respect for authority, but now he can’t even have a bloody wank in peace without her reminiscing.

  _Do you know what I most regret? Not all those times when I faked my orgasm to soothe your fragile male ego. No, it was the times you actually managed it. Not because you had the faintest idea how to pleasure a woman, but because I was in thrall to you, impressed by your power and your interest in me. Parlour tricks and vanity, that’s all we ever were._

“And yet you're still here,” he grimaces. “All the high priests in all the world, and you chose me. I’d be flattered, if I didn’t spend every waking minute wanting to exorcise you.”

It’s only half true - and besides, his waking moments are few and far between, these days.

_You really haven’t worked it out yet? I’m not going anywhere. You’re not being possessed, Faustus. You’re being eclipsed._

 

**VII**

 

There’s a patch of skin on his thigh that’s soft as silk. One evening as he undresses, he finds a birthmark that has appeared overnight yet somehow he has a memory of it being there forever. He finds that he has to cut his hair every other day, and when he looks in the mirror sometimes he sees amused green eyes looking back.

People will start to talk, he realises in a rare moment of lucidity, waking to find himself clad in a nightgown made of lace as delicate as spiderwebs. He’s not sure what would be worse - sharing his body with Zelda and all that entails, or slipping further and further into her skin until he’s the passenger and she moves freely through the world, reborn. He can feel her inside him now, slithering between muscle and cartilage, looking for a way out. He knows it’s only a matter of time before she finds one.

Perhaps she’s right, he thinks as he watches his hand write a compelling letter to the Council of Witches, arguing for the position of High Priest to be made officially gender neutral. He knows who will be the first woman appointed, once her miraculous resurrection is unveiled to the world.

At least he’ll get to keep his position, after a fashion. And truth be told, he really thinks this might be the Greendale Rollergirls' season.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Note: In this fic Blackwood's familiar is called Asmodeus after the demon of lust, because of course he is.


End file.
